I’ve recently switched to org-mode, and the nice thing is you really don’t have to dive into the deep end. The full scope is enormous, but all you really need to use is basic markup, at least for typically notetaking. You can add more features over time if/when you need them.
All I really used with basic org-mode was the labelling stuff. I could press a key and cycle between todo/done/whatever.
Really worked well with my list of lists mentality :) that was mostly thanks to org-agenda.
To tell a lie: I also used org-mode to write my emacs config, through literate programming. I don't have it any more, but it's a common thing to try. org-babel will compile your literate codes in sequence, throughout a document.
Thing that turned me off was that I work in WSL2 on Windows and my emacs setup there is for programming, and I didn't want to get into that context for this other stuff. Which means, making a second emacs config. Maybe I'll do it sometime, but right now I'm just figuring out what I'm asking for.
If the problem is multiple Emacs configs, I had the same issue and have been very happy with chemacs2: https://github.com/plexus/chemacs2. Only caveat is it does not play nicely with the various pre-built Emacs configs, so if you're using those you'll likely struggle.
